Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/23

Rh had taken place just opposite Wiju on the Yalu River, along the course of which Bezobrazoff and his Imperial associates had dreamed of planting a new outpost of Russian empire in the Far East. Following this unhappy battle at Wiju and Chiu Lien Ch'eng, the Russian arms sustained one disaster after the other.

The unfortunately well-proven Russian negligence and lack of conscientious care in details was patently manifest during these initial operations of the war. Since 1900 military topographers had been working on a map of Manchuria, but, not knowing the language of the country, they fell into unpardonable errors, which later brought heavy nemesis in lives and treasure.

One of their most flagrant blunders came about in this way. An officer with some soldiers would be studying a given territory and, wishing to place a village on his map, would ask one of the inhabitants for its name.

"Pu tung te (I do not understand)," came the answer of the Chinese or the Manchu, both of whom spoke the Mandarin Chinese in this district.

The officer would then mark on his map the village Putungte. This occurred so many times that, as a result, the Russian military map of Manchuria was covered with a net of villages and hamlets all bearing the same name of Putungte, which formed an unintelligible labyrinth from which the Russian military leaders could not disentangle themselves to the very end of the war; and Generals Grippenberg, Kuropatkin, Stackelberg and other lesser commanders paid a heavy price for this negligence and through this ignorance of the country contributed another step in the loss of Russian prestige before the Eastern peoples. The defeat of the Russian arms which resulted from this and similar avoidable acts of carelessness in the preparation and execution of their military